Front Porch Republic
American Gospel
Are our first principles as Americans, as humans, as creatures, sifted and rightly laid down?
A Fool’s Hope for Higher Education
Universities are peculiar institutions, and they need peculiar leaders.
From the Editor — Local Culture 8.1
Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place.
The Balance of Us: On the Strange Therapeutic Power of Faulkner’s Prose
The prose in As I Lay Dying simultaneously provides a mirror for and an escape from my experience.
The Need for Non-Ironic Limits: A Review of The Philosophy of Philip Rieff
We often find ourselves fleeing “forward,” one might say, to escape the meaninglessness that forever snaps at our heels.
News, Notes, & Podcasts
Newsletter Editor:
Jeffrey BilbroEnter your email to receive a weekly newsletter highlighting what’s new at FPR.
Calling All in Transit: Alternative Rock Songs
A friend of mine recently asked me for a Spotify playlist of alternative rock—but I don’t use Spotify, so I decided to make the playlist here. This week on A…
Baseball, Gardening, and the Metaverse
It’s been a rough week for those committed to Wendell Berry’s Terrapin Theory of Technology.
Life Could Be So Very Fine: Songs About Happiness
We’re listening to songs about happiness this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, and trying to find a way to separate songs about happiness from songs about being in…
Meatpackers, Barnes & Noble, and Wittgenstein
Arthur Brooks draws on Eitan Hersh and others to remind people that following politics like it’s entertainment erodes civic virtue.
More Articles
Why the Local Church Should Be Your Village
We’ve tried to make the village more hospitable to our hyper-individualistic sensibilities by vastly expanding it.
The Loneliness of Russia’s First Poet: Pushkin
Pushkin offered not only a sense of freedom but also examined it from the sharpest moral angles.
The Paradox of Welcome: Restoring the Intergenerational Welcome of the Church
In the communities I’ve observed, there’s a new hesitation over how to respond to infants.
Starbucks with Chinese Characteristics
China has gone through staggering economic growth and urbanization in the past few decades, and Starbucks has been along for the ride.
The Glories of Small Towns
Small towns not only engender local and national patriotism, but they also create the conditions for the arts to flourish.
When Yellowstone Became A Place
From the beginning of its own story, the landscape called Yellowstone has been a place.
All the Stars We Never See
The greater our creations have become, the more hollow they appear in contrast to what was here before us.
Haunted by Waters: A River Runs Through It at Fifty
We are ready to give ourselves. And yet we find that we do not know what part of ourselves to offer—or worse, that the part we have to give is not wanted.
Welcoming the Shadow Brother
One recent morning I realized something I should have noticed years ago, namely that for much of my life the extrovert in me has been selling out the introvert
An Affirmative Case for Christian Patriotism: A review of Daniel Darling’s In Defense of Christian Patriotism
A sense of biblically justified disavowal of one’s polity was not the norm in Christianity generally, and American Christianity specifically.
This Machine Kills Experience
The real impact of the digital revolution hits us directly in the place that matters most: our very experience of life
The Language of Joy: The Allure of Three Insatiable Letters
Joy is a little word: three letters, one syllable. It is luminous. It is impenetrable. It is a word that offers much, if it doesn’t slip out of your hand.
From the Archive